Building a Personal Content Recommendation System, Part Two: Data Processing and Cleaning

In part one of this blog series , I explored the motivation behind developing a personal recommendation system. The main goals are to learn how recommendation systems work and to build a tool that helps me find interesting blog posts and articles from feeds where only 1 in 20 posts might match my content interests. If you are interested in the technical implementation, the complete codebase is available in this github repository . ...

2025-03-26 · 5 min · Saeed Esmaili

Building a Personal Content Recommendation System, Part One: Introduction

Every morning, my RSS reader greets me with hundreds of new posts. Tech blogs, indie developers’ journals, photography content - they all compete for attention. While I’ve gotten good at quickly scanning through these feeds , I keep wondering about all the great content I might be missing from sources I’ve had to ignore simply because their signal-to-noise ratio doesn’t justify daily checking. On the other hand, the posts that I shortlist from my RSS feeds and read or listen to, end up on a curated repository of articles that have passed my personal quality threshold, so I have access to a valuable collection of content (on Pocket ) that is relevant to my interests. This made me wonder, can I utilize this data, and create a content recommendation system tailored to my preferences? Can I build a system that would review new posts from feeds where only 1 in 20 posts might match my content priorities, and filter those for me? ...

2025-03-16 · 4 min · Saeed Esmaili